HeyGen

TL;DR: HeyGen is one of the few AI video platforms that publishes a per-feature credit rate card, a refund window, and a rollover rule you can read before you pay. It is also a platform whose Terms state that free-plan output may not be "sold, sublicensed, redistributed, monetized, or used in connection with commercial activities," and whose help center says unused credits expire when you cancel or even pause. It holds 4.8 on G2 and 3.7 across 3,088 Trustpilot reviews, 18% of them one-star (verified 2026-09-03).

HeyGen turns a script into a video of a talking AI avatar, and translates existing video into 175+ languages with re-synced lips. For ad buyers it is the closest thing to a UGC factory that never ships a product to a human being.

Most HeyGen reviews ranking for this query are review aggregators with no editorial layer, or content marketing from companies selling a competing AI video tool. Neither reads the contract.

This page quotes HeyGen's pricing page, help center, Terms of Service, and moderation policy verbatim, with links and a date, then does the arithmetic those documents make possible. The short version: reviewers rate the product highly, and the disclosure beats the category norm. The money terms are where you get hurt.

How We Verified This

We have not paid for a HeyGen plan, and nothing here is presented as first-hand testing. We read the documents a buyer agrees to and checked them against public review data. Four layers, all dated 2026-09-03.

1. Primary contract. HeyGen's Terms and Conditions (opens in a new tab), effective 6 Mar 2025 and last updated 23 Jul 2026, plus the Content Moderation Policy (opens in a new tab), effective 25 Jul 2024.
2. Official help center. Six articles on help.heygen.com covering credit costs (opens in a new tab), credit plans (opens in a new tab), refunds (opens in a new tab), cancellation (opens in a new tab), avatars (opens in a new tab), and dynamic limits (opens in a new tab), plus the pricing page (opens in a new tab).
3. Public review corpora. Trustpilot (opens in a new tab) (3,088 reviews) and Capterra (opens in a new tab) (319), read for distribution shape and complaint clustering, not star average.
4. Practitioner forums. Brand-side threads used only as price anchors, linked and flagged as single unverified reports.

Where a fact could not be confirmed, we say so, and label it. We do not sell UGC, and no link on this page is an affiliate link.

What Does HeyGen Actually Cost in 2026?

HeyGen's pricing page listed Creator at "$29 / mo" with 600 credits, Pro at "$49 / mo" with 1,000, and Business at "$149 / mo" with 1,500 plus "Additional Seats are $20/seat" (verified 2026-09-03). Free is $0 and capped at three one-minute videos a month.

The plan price is not the number that matters. The credit rate is, because every feature bills against one pool.

Feature	Published credit cost
Avatar III Video Look	4 credits/min
Avatar III Photo Look	7 credits/min
Avatar IV Photo Look	16 credits/min
Avatar IV Video Look	31 credits/min
Avatar V (photo or video)	48 credits/min
Video Agent, Standard mode	40 credits/min
Video translation, no lip-sync	4 credits/min
Video translation, Speed mode	6 credits/min
Video translation, Precision mode	10 credits/min
AI model training	60 credits per model

Rates quoted from How to Use Credits on HeyGen (opens in a new tab) (verified 2026-09-03). HeyGen states that "when available, HeyGen will show the credit cost in-product before you generate."

Run the multiplication and the $29 tier shrinks fast. Creator's 600 credits buy 37.5 minutes of Avatar IV photo-look rendering, or 15 minutes of Video Agent output, before a single retake. On Avatar V it buys 12.5 minutes.

Two add-ons sit outside the plan price. Extra avatar slots cost "$29/month or $300/year" per the Video Avatar FAQ (opens in a new tab). Business can buy top-ups at "$0.05 per credit" with a "$5 for 100 credits" minimum purchase, and is the only tier with auto-reload; Creator and Pro cannot buy one-off credits at all, and must upgrade instead.

Gap 1. Our static fetch returned monthly figures only. The $24/mo annual Creator rate sits behind a client-side toggle; it appears in our platform record dated 2026-09-02 but we could not re-confirm it from page source.

What Does HeyGen's Fine Print Actually Say?

Clearer than most competitors publish, and considerably less generous than the marketing. Quotation marks below mean verbatim text from the linked document; anything unquoted is our summary of it. All verified 2026-09-03.

What you are agreeing to	Official wording	Source
Free-plan output cannot be used commercially	A license "solely for personal, non-commercial, and internal evaluation purposes." Free output may not be "sold, sublicensed, redistributed, monetized, or used in connection with commercial activities."	Terms (opens in a new tab)
Paid-plan output is genuinely yours	On Creator, Pro, and Business, "you own all rights in your User Input or User Output" and may use it "for your own purposes (including for commercial purposes)." No per-video fee, no expiry.	Terms (opens in a new tab)
HeyGen may train models on your content	A "royalty-free, transferable, sublicensable, worldwide and irrevocable" license to use Your Content "including to train or otherwise improve or modify our artificial intelligence and machine learning models."	Terms (opens in a new tab)
Payments are non-refundable by default	"Payments are non-refundable, except where required by law."	Terms (opens in a new tab)
The refund window is 15 days, and discretionary	Direct and Google Play purchases "may be refunded within 15 days," Apple within 14. Requests are "reviewed on a case-by-case basis and may not be granted if a significant amount of credits has already been created."	Refund policy (opens in a new tab)
Cancelling mid-cycle refunds nothing	"Canceling your subscription stops any future recurring charges, but we do not automatically provide prorated refunds for the remaining time left in your billing cycle."	Cancellation (opens in a new tab)
Unused credits die on cancellation	"If you cancel your paid plan and your account downgrades to the Free tier at the end of your billing cycle, any remaining unused credits will expire."	Cancellation (opens in a new tab)
Pausing also destroys your balance	Pausing postpones the next charge by roughly one cycle, and at that moment "your credit balance expires entirely. Unused credits are permanently lost and will not return when your subscription resumes."	Cancellation (opens in a new tab)
Rollover is one cycle, and only while you stay	"Monthly subscribers' unused credits roll over for one more month. Annual subscribers' credits accumulate until their annual renewal date. Credits do not carry over after cancellation."	Pricing page (opens in a new tab)
HeyGen deliberately publishes no minute counts	"Our pricing pages focus on the value and capabilities of each plan rather than specific minute counts." Videos per day and queue position are dynamic limits that adjust.	Dynamic limits (opens in a new tab)
Auto-renewal is the default	Your subscription "will automatically renew until you cancel it," and if you cancel before the period ends, "we will not refund any charges already paid."	Terms (opens in a new tab)
Political content is prohibited	Non-permissible content includes "content that displays political opinions, content related to political matters, or content that promotes political parties or candidates." HeyGen may "temporarily or permanently suspend the user's access to our Services."	Moderation policy (opens in a new tab)
Anyone depicted can pull their likeness	"The Actor reserves the right to request removal of their likeness from our Services at any time. You are responsible for honoring any request by or on behalf of an Actor to remove content depicting the Actor." Moderation appeals go to moderation@heygen.com.	Moderation policy (opens in a new tab)
Disputes go to arbitration, individually	You agree to "resolve any past or present claims relating to these Terms or our Services through final and binding arbitration," with a class action waiver and a 30-day opt-out from first access.	Terms (opens in a new tab)

Read row one twice. Almost every listicle recommends starting on the free plan to test whether HeyGen works for your ads. Under the Terms as written on 2026-09-03, running free-plan output as a paid ad is a breach. Free is an evaluation tier, not a cheap production tier.

Row three is where enterprise legal teams stop. The training license is irrevocable and sublicensable, and it covers Your Content, not only outputs.

Four things we could not confirm:

• Gap 2. Whether failed renders refund credits. Neither credit article addresses it. HeyGen does not publish this, which matters given how often it appears in complaints.
• Gap 3. Generative Credit packs. The help center index surfaces a pack at $15/month for 300 credits, but the article URL returned HTTP 404 on direct fetch. Treat that price as unconfirmed.
• Gap 4. Whether Business credits scale with seats. The pricing page lists 1,500 credits and $20 per seat without saying whether the pool grows. Get it in writing from sales.
• Gap 5. What happens to a trained avatar model after account deletion. The avatar FAQ is silent. The Terms say only that HeyGen "may, but is not obligated to, delete any of Your Content."

Why Is HeyGen 4.8 on G2 and 3.7 on Trustpilot?

Because the two populations rate different things. G2 and Capterra collect reviews largely through vendor-facing flows and skew toward people evaluating software. Trustpilot collects self-motivated posts, and on HeyGen those cluster hard around billing. The gap is a full point.

Source	Score	Reviews	Verified
G2	4.8 / 5	~1,900 (see note)	Record dated 2026-09-02
Capterra	4.7 / 5	319	2026-09-03, live
Trustpilot	3.7 / 5	3,088	2026-09-03, live

Capterra's sub-scores sharpen the point. It rates HeyGen 4.7 on ease of use and 4.6 on customer service across 319 reviews, while Trustpilot's recent negatives are dominated by support failure. Both are real. They measure different moments in the relationship.

The Trustpilot distribution is 63% five-star, 9% four, 5% three, 5% two, and 18% one-star. That is a barbell, not variance around an average, and the bottom bar is where the billing complaints live.

Note on the G2 count. G2 returned HTTP 403 to our anonymous fetch on 2026-09-03, so we could not re-verify it. Our own platform record, dated 2026-09-02, holds 1,924. We flag it as unconfirmed rather than restate it as current.

What Do HeyGen Buyers Actually Complain About?

Five named patterns, clustered from 1-star Trustpilot reviews dated 1 Aug to 2 Sep 2026 (read 2026-09-03). These are third-party reports, not our findings.

Credits charged above the published rate. A review titled "HeyGen charged more credits than its own published rate" posted 31 Aug 2026 is the clearest case. This pattern has leverage because the rate card is public and therefore checkable. HeyGen publishes no dispute path for credit discrepancies.

Credits running out mid-project. Reviewers describe the balance being cut off partway through a build, forcing an upgrade to finish work already started. On Creator and Pro this is structural: those tiers cannot buy top-ups.

Billing continuing after cancellation. At least two August 2026 reviews describe charges landing after a cancellation the user believed went through. HeyGen's own article anticipates this, telling users who keep receiving invoices to email support.

Refund requests going unanswered. "Requested a Full Refund — Still No Response" is representative. The refund policy sets a 24 to 48 hour expectation for an initial update, which makes silence a documented deviation rather than an opinion.

Support that upsells instead of resolving. "Customer support is upselling instead of helping" (1 Sep 2026). Several reviews describe generic automated replies. Note the contrast with Capterra's 4.6 service score.

One pattern we will not quantify: several third-party reviews assert roughly 40% of HeyGen generations are unusable while still burning credits. No source we found publishes a method, sample size, or date range. We use a retake assumption below and label it as an assumption, because nobody has measured this publicly.

What Will Forty Usable Ads Actually Cost?

About $0.78 in platform spend per usable 30-second clip on Creator, and about $11 all-in once you price the human editing time — $0.78 of software against roughly $10 of labor. The gap between those two numbers is the whole story, and the pages ranking for this query do not model it.

Assumptions, stated plainly. A 30-second ad on Avatar IV Photo Look at 16 credits/min costs 8 credits per render (rate QUOTED, clip length ESTIMATED). We assume 2 renders per keeper, so 16 credits per shipped ad (ESTIMATED).

Line item	Amount	Basis
Creator plan, 600 credits	$29/mo	QUOTED, pricing page
Usable 30s ads from 600 credits	37	Calculated from quoted rate plus 2x retake assumption
Platform cost per shipped ad	$0.78	Calculated
One extra avatar slot	$29/mo	QUOTED, Video Avatar FAQ
Editing, captioning, trimming	~$10/clip	ESTIMATED, 15 min at $40/hr
Top-ups if you overrun	Business only, $0.05/credit	QUOTED, credit plans article
Credits forfeited if you cancel	100% of unused balance	QUOTED, cancellation article

Solo operator shipping 40 ads a month on Pro: $49 plus a $29 avatar slot is $78/mo, or $936 a year in platform spend. Add editing and the real annual number is roughly $5,700, of which 84% is labor.

Five-person team on Business: $149 plus four seats at $20 is $229/mo, or $2,748 a year — the pricing page does not say whether the $149 base includes one seat, and we assume it does (ESTIMATED). The credit pool is still 1,500, which is about 93 shipped ads a month across five people, or 19 each, unless credits scale with seats (Gap 4, unconfirmed).

Price the annual lock-in separately. Annual credits accumulate all year, but "credits do not carry over after cancellation." Prepay twelve months, quit in month four, and you forfeit both the remaining fees and the stockpiled balance.

Is $0.78 per clip cheap? Brand-side posters in r/ecommerce (opens in a new tab) anchor human UGC video at $50 to $110 apiece — a single practitioner thread, unverified, used only as an order-of-magnitude anchor. Even at $11 all-in, HeyGen is roughly four to ten times cheaper. What it does not buy is a real person holding your product. Our UGC platform pricing page sets the two models side by side, and the rate calculator will run your own volume.

Who Should Not Buy HeyGen?

Eight buyers who should walk, each disqualified by a document rather than an opinion. This is the section most pages on this query skip.

Anyone running free-plan output as an ad. The Terms restrict free output to "personal, non-commercial, and internal evaluation purposes." Use free to judge avatar quality, then pay before you publish.

Anyone who buys in bursts. Credits expire on cancellation and during a pause. If your production is seasonal, you pay every month just to keep a balance alive, which turns a $29 tool into a $348 annual commitment.

Anyone who needs a reliable refund path. Payments are non-refundable except where law requires, the window is 15 days, and requests may be denied once "a significant amount of credits has already been created." Using the product weakens your claim.

Brands with strict data or IP policies. The training license is irrevocable, sublicensable, and worldwide. If legal will not sign that, negotiate an enterprise agreement rather than self-serving onto Creator.

Political campaigns and advocacy groups. Political content is non-permissible under the moderation policy, and enforcement includes permanent suspension. Do not build a workflow on a platform whose acceptable-use policy excludes your category.

Teams that need output guarantees. HeyGen states outright that its pricing pages avoid "specific minute counts," and lists videos per day and queue position as limits that adjust. Fine for marketing, unacceptable for an SLA.

Buyers who subscribed through the iOS app. Your window is 14 days and the request goes to Apple, not HeyGen. That is one fewer party you can escalate to.

Brands whose ads must read as human. HeyGen makes avatars. If the creative depends on a real customer unboxing a real product, a marketplace like Billo or Insense is the right category, not a better prompt.

Who Should Buy It?

Marketing and localization teams with steady monthly volume. If you will reliably spend 600 credits a month, the credit system stops being a trap: on the model above a shipped 30-second clip costs well under a dollar in platform spend, with clean commercial rights and no per-video licensing fee.

The 175+ language translation is the strongest reason to pick HeyGen over a pure AI-UGC tool. At 4 to 10 credits per minute, localizing one video into a dozen markets costs less than filming one of them.

How Does HeyGen Compare to the Alternatives?

Synthesia is the closest competitor and the better corporate-training buy. Arcads and Creatify are narrower tools built specifically for AI UGC ads. All three publish less contractual detail than HeyGen does.

• Synthesia headlines its plans in included minutes while billing in credits underneath, at 2 credits per second of video, which makes budgeting easier and cross-feature flexibility worse. Its real L&D differentiator is SCORM export; HeyGen's Business tier lists LMS integrations but no SCORM. See HeyGen vs Synthesia.
• Arcads positions itself as ad-native, built around hooks and pacing for paid social, but its public review signal is far weaker than HeyGen's — 2.7/5 across 170 Trustpilot reviews. See Arcads vs HeyGen.
• Creatify generates ads from a product URL rather than a written script, which trades control over script and avatar for a shorter path to a first draft. See Creatify vs HeyGen.

For the full field, see our roundup of the best AI UGC video tools.

Final Verdict

7.2 / 10. HeyGen is the most transparent operator in a category that mostly publishes nothing, and it still has terms that will cost careless buyers money.

What it does well: a public per-feature credit rate card, a published refund window, self-serve cancellation with documented steps, an appeals address on the moderation policy, and full commercial ownership of paid output with no expiry and no per-video fee. Very little of that exists at Arcads or Creatify.

What it does badly: forfeits your balance on cancellation or pause, bars free-plan output from commercial use in language most buyers never read, claims an irrevocable training license over your content, and carries a billing complaint cluster its 4.8 G2 score does not reflect.

Publish weekly and buy Pro, skipping the free plan for anything you intend to run. If your volume is lumpy, or you cannot absorb a forfeited balance, this pricing model is working against you.

Frequently Asked Questions

Can you use HeyGen's free plan for commercial ads?

No. HeyGen's Terms grant free users a license "solely for personal, non-commercial, and internal evaluation purposes," and state free output may not be "sold, sublicensed, redistributed, monetized, or used in connection with commercial activities" (verified 2026-09-03). Creator and above give full commercial ownership.

What happens to HeyGen credits when you cancel?

They expire. The help center states that if you cancel and downgrade to Free, "any remaining unused credits will expire" (verified 2026-09-03). The same applies during a pause. Rollover covers one extra cycle, and only while you keep paying.

Does HeyGen give refunds?

Rarely, and never automatically. The Terms state "payments are non-refundable, except where required by law." The help center allows requests within 15 days for direct and Google Play purchases and 14 via Apple, reviewed case by case, and notes a request may be denied once "a significant amount of credits has already been created."

How many videos does 600 credits actually make?

About 37 usable 30-second clips on our assumptions. At HeyGen's published 16 credits per minute for Avatar IV Photo Look, a 30-second render costs 8 credits, and we assume two renders per keeper. On Avatar V at 48 credits per minute, the same 600 credits buy roughly 12 shipped clips.

Is HeyGen better than Synthesia?

For marketing, localization, and social video, yes. For corporate training, no. Synthesia headlines minutes rather than credits and ships SCORM export, which makes it the safer L&D purchase. HeyGen's 175+ language translation and credit flexibility suit ad teams better. Full breakdown in HeyGen vs Synthesia.